RIP GOP

Pass that bill = watch the entire country go up in flames. I'm buying the popcorn right now. Don't forget the marshmallows! 

Come on, everyone! Let's ROAST the Republican Party this summer!! 

Is it just me, or is it getting rather hot in here...?

The Earth is made of cubes

Pythagoreans, Platonists and Lego fans, rejoice! It turns out the Ancients were right... sort of.

You'd be tempted, at least initially, to imagine something like what was presumably the same kind of mystical reverence, an almost unbounded sense of awe, felt by the original interlocutors of geometrical relation resulting from this relatively new and dramatic discovery. The universe has at last confirmed beyond a shadow of a doubt its most tantalizing of hints - that a simple underlying mathematical framework links numerical possibility with the physical structure of the material world. There has been almost no other story of progress through the ages.

Yet at the same time that underlying mathematical framework is ever more subtle and altogether more prosiac. Consider that iron (Fe, number 26 on the periodic table) is the most common element found on Earth by mass, and that it makes up the majority of our planet's inner and outer cores. Since iron is a metallically-bonded element with a cubic crystal system (BCC or FCC, depending on temperature and pressure), you would expect to find distinctive larger-scale expressions of its intrinsic material properties when found in large quantities, even when bonded with other elements. Chemical composition obviously has a direct effect on the way any material behaves at the macro scale: whether or how it may fracture, flow, bond, solidify, become a vapor, rapidly oxidize (that is, explode), etc.

So is it really all that surprising that terrestrial material (and in turn the material from which the solar system itself was formed) tends to cleave along boundaries oriented, roughly speaking, at 90° angles - precisely in the manner of cubes? A quirk of the local chemistry. Nothing mysterious. 

Actually the picture is just slightly more complicated. Like carbon, iron is an oddly versatile element when it comes to atomic packing arrangements. Not only does iron spontaneously switch from a Body-Centered Cubic (BCC) to a Face-Centered Cubic (FCC) system and then back to Body-Centered Cubic again when heated to high enough temperatures and pressures, under conditions of extreme pressure it will even assume the Hexagonal Close-Packed (HCP) structure that, like FCC, is the tightest of all possible packing arrangements given proportional size of spherical elements. It is thought that the interior of Earth's core, under immense pressures at the center of our planet, might consist of an iron alloy bearing this hexagonal arrangement, known as hexaferrum, or ε-Fe. 

The trouble is, atoms aren't really spheres; consequently, the Earth can't really be made of cubes. At any scale. The most we can say is that nature is a process by which certain definite regularities are seemingly endlessly approximated, but never precisely duplicated or permanently fixed. It is as the whole of physical law amounts to one giant counterfactual, an empty set: a looming void of non-being to which the reality of any given situation may approach as closely as one may wish, but never enter.. hold on... wai ta  min  ute .we 'r e br eaki n g  u  p  .. .. ...u     m .. . t   h    i     s    i  s  h  ar d ...     t     o      .  . .      d         o  o  o    ooo  o      o .   .  .   ..  .    ..    ... . . .       .   .    .     . 

To answer the previous question

...an observer is a perspective, and a perspective is a path. 

ArtWauk!!

A big "Thank You" to everyone who participated in this month's ArtWauk event and festival in downtown Waukegan over the weekend and to all who stopped by Post Marketplace and stayed on through part or all of my set! 

It was a real treat for me to play out finally and share the fruits of my labor after all this time spent recovering from one ailment or another whilst making the transition to a new city. Thanks especially to Charlotte for inviting me and for being such a genuine pleasure to work with! Hope to see you all at next month's ArtWauk!

 

STAND!

https://web.njit.edu/~newrev/3.0/stroffolino1.html

Canvas the town and brush the backdrop...

Are you sleeping... Brother John?

An edifice comes tumbling down.   

The future belongs not to those fighting to maintain ideals, but to those with fresh ideas and minds bent on problem-solving.  

Power, Corruption and Butterflies

My flower garden out back. Native plantings coming up from seed - some this year, some the next.

 

Did I mention I have a house? Last year. A miracle! I barely survived. A story to tell some time. More like several stories... just enjoy the pretty picture for now. 😁

Back on the cloud!

@insectoid_intelligence · EXOplanet (Dub)

Once, more than several years ago, while high on LSD, I walked across a bridge over the Mississippi River. Rather than becoming anxious about the drop, I found myself in an unusually calm state of mind as I approached the center of the span, which seemed like a giant runway arching up to cloud level at some kind of colossal cosmic airport. It was around then that I started to become aware of a distinct impression as I walked along. Or rather, it was perhaps just the same impression as always, but something about it had definitely changed in a profound, yet fairly indescribable way. 

Be that as it may, I'll try to explain it: quite suddenly I ceased to remain aware of myself as a person slowly walking along across the top surface of a stationary bridge. Instead - as one might have to say it - there was a bridge that was walking itself along beneath my feet, rotating slowly under me, while I remained entirely stationary above it, save for the repetitive pedaling motion of my legs.

We know, by now, that all motion is relative to the observer. Intuitively, I might speculate that this "illusion" was caused mainly by the specific set (or lack) of visual cues typically encountered when standing or walking on a tall, narrow structure, in addition to the profoundly disassociative effects of the acid. But the experience has nevertheless stayed with me for reasons I can't entirely explain. It seems to me, even now, that the way I looked at motion then wasn't fundamentally wrong.

After all, what exactly is an observer?